


Old Friends

by PeniG



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Best Friends, Cuddling, Friendship, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Other, Talking, a little bit of plothole filling, mostly lots of talking on the beach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2019-06-26
Packaged: 2020-05-20 09:45:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19374190
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeniG/pseuds/PeniG
Summary: A day at the beach. They have a lot of catching up to do, a lot of basic things they don't know about each other. And Heaven is watching.(Have you wondered why a search targeting Aziriphale's illicit behavior only turned up three shots of him hanging out with Crowley? Well, now you'll have a little more to go on.)





	Old Friends

**Author's Note:**

> I pulled the names "Liriel" and "Sabriel" out of the air because they sound angelic. Abhorsen fans should not waste their time looking for references.

Tomorrow, this beach would vanish under blankets, umbrellas, bodies, buckets and spades, children like perpetual motion machines; but it was the night before August Bank Holiday weekend, and they’d had the place to themselves all day long, with minimum effort; which was good, because keeping the gulls out of the picnic basket was enough work for anyone. Both Crowley and Aziriphale had the content, comfortable tiredness of a day well spent: swimming, building an elaborate sand castle whose destruction by the incoming tide had been a thing of beauty, eating when they felt like it, talking when they felt like it, Aziriphale reading when he felt like it and reading aloud when Crowley felt like lying with his head in his angel’s lap listening to his voice.

The sun went down in a blaze of sailor’s delight as Aziriphale read the last verse of the _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ , and then they sat in silence, Aziriphale absently stroking the salt out of Crowley’s hair with one hand, and protecting the elaborate jeweled cover of the book with the other. The stars would be out soon, but for now it was just them, and the waves, the gulls rowing the air with their wings, the crabs and sandpipers racing up and down the tideline. If Crowley hadn’t just woken up from a summer-long nap the day before he would have been falling asleep, but Aziriphale could feel him, relaxed and alert, and see his eyes awaiting the advent of the stars.

“I don’t wish to intrude, or make you dwell on sad subjects,” said Aziriphale, “but I thought I should let you know that, if you ever wish to talk about your friend, I would like to hear about him, very much.”

“Eh? What friend?” Crowley’s head stirred under his hand.

“The one who died, that Saturday.”

Crowley rolled his head to shift his gaze from the evening star blazing in the sun’s red aureole to Aziriphale’s face. “That was you, angel.”

“But - I wasn’t dead! And when I called - you said you were with an old friend -“

Crowley huffed a half-laugh. “It’s past time we caught each other up on that day, isn’t it? Short version: Duke Hastur was trying to carry me back to Hell for losing Adam and catching his partner in a holy water booby trap. Terseness was called for.”

Aziriphale had to nudge his heart to remember to beat. “I see.”

“As soon as I shook him - which by the way was much easier to do, knowing you and I were back on, nothing like having something to live for to amp up the old survival instincts - I drove over to pick you up and I couldn’t sense you, which was worrying, and then the bookstore was on fire and no sense nor sign of you anywhere.” His voice did not catch, exactly, but something in it made Aziriphale’s throat contract, all the same. “And, you know, you _were_ discorporated. It might have been one of Hastur’s cronies, coming for you with Hellfire because Hell realized we were in cahoots. They had, you know. Hastur mentioned you - your best friend Aziraphale - I actually heard him put his mouth on your name! Ugh! It might even have been Heaven annihilating you for hanging with me. I didn’t know. Didn’t care. In neither scenario would I see you again. So I went and got blind drunk and then - there you were - and wham! I was back on my bullshit.”

“Tsk.” Crowley knew how Aziriphale felt about ugly scatological expressions. The tightness in his throat prevented his making any other sound.

“Who exactly did you imagine my best friend _could_ be, if not you?”

That demanded an answer, so Aziriphale cleared his larynx by sheer spiritual force. “Well, I, I didn’t know, did I? You only ever ranted to me about the things that annoyed you about Hell, but if you’d tried to talk to me about your friends there I would have shut you down in a trice, so I wouldn’t expect to know anything about that side of it. And if you’d been palling around with any particular humans, I might have felt it my duty to interfere since - excuse me - you could hardly have been doing their spiritual health any good. In theory. You were unlikely to put me in that position. So you could have any number of other cronies, and me none the wiser. I admit it was a shock, to think of you, er, liking anyone better than me, but given how I’d behaved to you earlier that day I couldn’t exactly be surprised about it. I could barely sense you at all from limbo, and we had such urgent business -“

“And then we never compared notes.” Crowley stretched out one hand to find his wineglass by feel, and hitched himself up far enough in Aziriphale’s lap to drink from it. “All the same - you thought I had friends among those wankers in Hell?”

“I knew you did, my dear. You told me so. Keeping bad company as you sauntered vaguely downward, asking questions. I hope - I hope recent events don’t prove to have created permanent rifts with anyone whose opinion you still value.”

Crowley made an ungentlemanly noise. “None of them were ever my _friends_ , angel! Oh, I thought some of them were, once - thought Hastur was, for awhile before the Fall. And back then I admired Lucifer.”

“Well, so did we all! Time was, nobody reflected more Glory. He never noticed me, of course, or my head might have turned as much as anyone’s.”

Crowley’s ungentlemanly noise, this time, seemed to not so much reject the notion as to hurl it into the sea. “No, _yours_ wouldn’t have; but _mine_ was turned right off. I was dazzled. That was the secret to Falling, you know. The one thing we all had in common: wanting to impress that bastard Lucifer and be part of his special little club. When he said God had no business leaving us out of the loop I thought he meant to confront Her and get some _answers_. And I fancied myself as the go-to guy for the _questions_.”

The note of self-disgust in his voice hurt far more than discorporating had, not least because it matched a note in Aziriphale’s own internal monolog as he’d tended Crowley’s plants and warded his flat while contemplating his own past behavior. Behavior for which Crowley had forgiven him the moment he brought it up. Forgiving himself was another matter, and so, apparently, was it for Crowley. But he had comforted more than one repentant sinner in his time. “A hard lesson to learn, that your friends were playing on your weaknesses and virtues, and did not have your interests at heart,” he said.

“That’s not - I - hm -“ Crowley went through seven expressions in six seconds and took a sip from his wineglass, before opting to turn the subject. “What about you, though, angel? What about your friends in Heaven? You going to miss them? Have you heard from any of them, since everything went down?”

“I never had anybody to miss, especially,” Aziriphale admitted. “I was never gregarious, like you. I had my job setting up the Akashic Records and that was enough for me, mostly. The other angels I worked with would include me in what they were doing, and we all liked each other well enough in our own ways, but I was the third set of wheels in that office and we all knew it. Absolute soulmates, Liriel and Sabriel! So when Michael showed up after the Revolt to tell us God declined to make more angels and the Hosts were so thinned by the numbers who had Fallen or been destroyed, that all the other departments were being cut and he needed “volunteers” to transfer to the Host - well! It was either Sabriel and Liriel “volunteering” together and wasting their vast intelligence on guarding and thwarting, leaving me to manage the Records alone, or me stepping up. Michael wouldn’t have been at all keen on how attached they were to each other, if it had been brought to his attention. Very big on Duty First and proper shows of enthusiasm in those days, was Michael.”

“And that’s how you wound up at the Gate with a flaming sword, is it? Covering for those two? Huh. I always wondered who ever looked at _you_ and said, _There’s somebody who’ll keep the pesky humans out! Bet he can smite like anything!_ ” Crowley smiled up at him lazily, the evening shadows pooling in the crags of his face, the last red rays of the sun lighting the angles. “You’d think this Lirisabriel couple would be grateful to you for the effort, though. You’d think they’d keep in touch.”

“Oh, they did, occasionally. Sent greetings on the opening of the bookshop, that sort of thing. But they were pretty much all-in-all to each other, apart from the Records, and since I wasn’t working with them anymore I didn’t, didn’t have all that much in common with them, after awhile, did I? And I didn’t like to initiate contact with them because, well, you know me, I don’t like to be disturbed -“

“Yes, that’s what makes it fun!”

“And I certainly didn’t want to disturb them. They’re no doubt busy as bees, managing the records short-handed, and, you know, they Manage the Records. They know the best times to contact me, if they care to.”

“Wait. Hang on. The Akashic Records. Weren’t they, weren’t we - you - _angels_ supposed to - those show everything, don’t they? Everything on Earth? The fall of the sparrow and whatnot?”

“Yes. I’ve often thought they must have their hands, and wings, and wheels, full with it, as much goes on down here as it does. And of course it was designed to be run and maintained by three operators, not two. Theoretically the Search functions are available to everyone, but the last time I spoke to them everyone else would complain that they were too complicated and leave work orders for them to do it.”

“So - and they know you? They sent greetings about the bookshop, must’ve looked in on you from time to time, so - the Arrangement? They must’ve known about it? Mustn’t they?”

“If they looked in on me often enough over the millennia, yes, I suppose they must have done. But I don’t know, do I? Possibly they didn’t care enough to look. Maybe the only reason they sent me greetings about the bookshop was because of the commendation and promotion I was supposed to be receiving about that time. Maybe they tweaked a report to increase my chances of the commendation, or maybe nobody asked them for a proper search, or - I don’t know, that’s the point.”

Crowley sat up. “So they could - any minute now - they could go poking around in the Records and find out what we, how we - “

“Shh, dear. Yes, they could. But I don’t think they will.”

“Why, because you took a flaming sword for them once six thousand years ago? Angels are ungrateful bastards, you know that -“

He shivered in the wind off the ocean, and Aziriphale wrapped his wings around him. “Because, I think, Liriel and Sabriel aren’t like that. No, my dear, listen. You didn’t think you were the only angel in Heaven asking questions, did you? Liriel and Sabriel asked questions all the time. Not of God, though. Of each other, of me, and most importantly - of the Records. Big complicated open ended questions, too, like What is Purpose for? Since the whole time we worked together we were setting up the Records, a lot of the questions they asked back then were about the way the Records should be used. As far as I know, they invented the concept of Privacy. They had long wrangles about Judgement. I think - I hope - I trust that it would be unlike them to, to interfere with us.”

“I remember how well it went the last time you trusted Heaven.”

“So do I. But, they’re not Archangels. It’s one thing to trust a, an administration in which God is silent and Gabriel and Michael run things, and quite another to believe in, in individual angels who started out not so different from ourselves, and have had the same millennia to be changed by Earthly experience as we have.”

“But you can’t _know_ they’re trustworthy!”

“No, I can’t. And I can’t do anything about that, either. If they are, then communicating with them now would be dangerous for them. And if they aren’t, well, nothing came of it while you were asleep, did it? Anything we did to assure ourselves one way or another would only draw their attention. So it’s best to leave them alone and not worry about it. Liriel and Sabriel may not be my, my colleagues any more, but I will believe they are my enemies when I see them act against us. And I hope you respect my judgement enough to do the same.”

Crowley seemed poised for an argument, but just then a meteor flashed across the darkest portion of the sky, and he tracked it with his eyes instead. Aziriphale put his book away and helped himself to a pear, its skin miraculously smooth and unblemished despite being transported from London in a basket crowded with fruit, cold meat, deviled eggs, angel cake, cheese, three kinds of bread, and wine. They rearranged themselves on the picnic blanket to watch the stars bloom, the meteors fall, the planets and satellites move in their slow and complex dance. The waves and the nightbirds and the wind ruffling the wings they wrapped around each other made a background music whose rhythms only they had the necessary experience to fully appreciate. Far out to sea, a pair of silent running lights slipped by, some sailing craft not ready to put out a sea anchor or slip into a port. Eventually the moon rose.

“We’re a couple of lonely old buggers, between us,” said Crowley. “Did you ever try to make friends with the humans? I did, for awhile. Had to give it up. Didn’t seem fair, somehow. Not when I was supposed to be tempting them. But I expect it’s different when you’re blessing them.”

“Except that if you concentrate your blessings on the humans you happen to hang out with, that’s not fair, either,” Aziriphale pointed out. “I always enjoyed their amusements, though. Group meals, storytelling, theater, dancing, all that business. I could try the cuisine, be the audience, listen to the conversations, spread blessings around evenhandedly, get a real sense of what kind of blessings would be, would be _meaningful_ to them. Mostly it was a night here and a night there. On long-term assignments you can’t help getting fond of them, though. Merlin and I had such interesting talks! Very powerful brains he had, Merlin. Very messy, though, and the way that all ended was so heartbreaking. And while humans, and other angels whose assignments crossed with mine, came and went, I always knew you were around somewhere, and that was company, of a sort.”

“Of a sort! You resisted it hard enough. Every time I thought I had you settled down, something would happen to spook you.” Crowley shifted, and Aziriphale shifted in response, so that his head was in the hollow of Crowley’s shoulder, and the wings meshed securely on top of them. “I suppose knowing your ex-co-workers might be watching _would_ be a bit of a drag on the Arrangement.”

“Just so. Though the longer it went unmentioned the easier it was to believe no one would ever mention it. So I let myself get used to not being lonely. And then you went off in such a tiff in the middle of the 19th century.”

“I was not in a tiff! I just - wanted a nap.”

“All right, dear, but you went to bed mad, there’s no denying that! And what you’d asked for - why I thought you wanted it - was the, the booby trap for pursuing demons really something you were anticipating as early as that?”

“Have I _ever_ looked suicidal to you?”

That wasn’t a yes, but Aziriphale let it pass, this time. “People don’t, always! Don’t you think there’d be fewer writers committing suicide in this jurisdiction if I had a reliable way to spot them in time? Anyway, the possibility of the use you ultimately put it to never occurred to me, and thinking you might want it for yourself was a hideous shock. Here I’d been congratulating myself - which I should’ve known better than, but there we are - on having done you good and tempted you back toward the side of righteousness bit by bit, and then you turned around and asked for _that_! I was horrified! I wanted to make you eligible for Redemption, not so dissatisfied with your demonic existence you preferred annihilation! I decided it would be better for both of us if I kept my distance, but I’d gotten used to the company. When I knew I’d be seeing you sooner or later, and could feel you moving around my territory more or less, I could wait years and even decades without more direct contact, but when I thought we were done I missed you constantly. And I thought, well, I’m here for the humans’ sake, not my own, so I kept the bookstore open more and went out more. Keeping busy, you know. I joined a few clubs, learned to dance -“

Crowley’s laugh would’ve been offensive if Aziriphale had felt at all like taking offense. “Angels can’t dance!”

“ _I_ can,” said Aziriphale, with prim satisfaction. “Any dance at all, as long as it’s a gavotte. It was _work_ , too, let me tell you! I frequented all the theaters regularly, attended most literary events, met scads of what they called “lions” back then. Became rather close to Oscar Wilde, as a matter of fact, though I took care not to be visible in a biographical fashion. You may have noticed I have a complete set of his works, most of them inscribed.”

“Hang on, wait, I did notice that! Kept tripping over them, and one day one fell open on ‘To my dear FELLow.’ Looked him up. I must say if _that’s_ an example of his fabled wit -“

“I’d met him well before he started working on that rep, my dear. It was one of those jokes that becomes fonder over time, because it was so stupid.”

“Didn’t he go to jail, though? For something even Heaven wouldn’t have thought was worth a reprimand? Or have I mixed him up with somebody else?”

“He did.” Aziriphale sighed. “I tried to talk sense to him, but he _would_ sue for slander and once the ball got rolling it became more and more impossible to protect him without violating someone’s Free Will. It was so frustrating! I nearly gave in to the temptation more than once before it was all over. Good thing it’s so hard to do. So after Oscar died I swore off humans again, and just dealt with the lonesome, until I felt you wake up.”

“Bloody bombs,” muttered Crowley. “Mind you, the Blitz was a playground. Shortages and black markets and tempers running high, all that uncertainty, sleeping in tube stations, blackouts - and the sleep had done me good. Ideas spilling out all over the place.”

“It was a good time for blessings and miracles, too. I was always pushed to capacity, and nothing I did in those days could ever be classed as frivolous.”

“Do you ever miss it?”

“No!”

“Me neither. But if you were so busy, how’d you have time to get mixed up in that spy nonsense?”

“I couldn’t stay busy _enough_! I wanted to see you, and was so sure I should stay away from you for your own good, and between the blackout and rationing most of my usual diversions were restricted. So I started keeping the store open every hour of daylight. Miss Montgomery was charming, with excellent taste in books, and when she ‘recruited’ me I was ripe for the picking.”

“Good thing you had me looking out for you.”

Aziriphale smiled into Crowley’s feathers. “Yes, a very good thing.”

In time, the stars paled and the first day of the weekend began to consider dawning. They packed up at a dawdling human pace, leaving no visible or chemical trace behind. “I hate to leave,” said Aziriphale.

“It’ll be wall-to-wall screaming kids in a few hours,” said Crowley. “Unless we claim it. Want to seal it off?”

“Certainly not! These families need their relaxation and touch of nature as much as we do, and don’t have nearly our flexibility in when to achieve it. I’d like to come back some time, but when we’re not using it, let the humans have their fun.” He secured the picnic basket in the boot. “Shame London’s so far away from the beach, though.”

“Not when I’m driving! And I’m always driving.”

“You should teach me sometime.”

“What’s to teach? You get in the car, you tell it to go places. But you’ll have to get your own car. Nobody drives the Bentley but me.”

They shook out the sand (all of the sand, though it took both of them to do it) from the blanket. Aziriphale took one last dip before drying out his modest bathing suit and changing it for tartan shorts and the palest Hawaiian shirt in existence. Crowley donned his sunglasses with a black t-shirt and skinny black jeans. They both turned to look back at the beach and check the security of the adjustments they had made. The tourists who came during the next three days would find any litter they dropped persistently blowing back at them until they disposed of it properly; any and all trash that floated in would collect itself neatly in one spot to be carted away; no fishing line would tangle any creature; nothing living would be carted away to die gasping and unheeded in a seashell collection no one would ever look at again. The gulls, however, would be more diabolically clever than any other gulls along the coast, and the sand would be both more invasive and more resistant to shaking, dumping, vacuuming, and sweeping. Today’s holidaymakers would still be trying to get it out of their cars, shoes, and bathing suits at Christmastime.

“I don’t want to go back to my flat,” said Crowley.

“Then we won’t,” said Aziriphale. “Where would you like to go?”

“I don’t know. The bookshop will do for now, I suppose, but - I couldn’t live there. You don’t even have a bed.”

“That’s fixable, my dear,” said Aziriphale, trying to imagine how to fit one in. The flat above the bookshop was essentially more bookshop, and already crammed to the gills. The kitchen where he conducted his little cooking experiments was in the basement, where it had always been when he had a servant to cook, and the bathtub was down there, too, along with the inevitable overflow of books, recordings, and snuffboxes. No doubt with thought and some judicious miracling Crowley and his plants could be made to fit, though. “I think we could live very well together.”

“So do I, angel. But - not there. That’s _your_ space. And not my flat. It was about time to change addresses again anyway, and now it’s always going to be where Ligur died. I can’t get the stain out of the floor. We need an _us_ space. If we’re doing this. And we are - aren’t we?”

Aziriphale took his hand. “Certainly we are. We’ll keep our eyes open for someplace where we can both be comfortable.”

*  
In the Hall of the Akashic Records, Gabriel looked at the result of his Search request with blank astonishment that gradually turned to pink-faced rage. “ _Unable to comply?_ What in heaven and out of it does _that_ mean?”

Liriel(but he didn’t know that; no one but themselves could tell them apart anymore) regarded him with an assortment of wheels and eyes a long way from the conventional appearances angels preferred to don these days. Sabriel waited until Gabriel shuddered and looked away before answering: “The terms of your search are not admissible under our Mandate.” The voice came from every portion of the Hall, which glittered with a million flickering colors. The Archangels had long ago requested that search orders be filled in black-and-white frozen images for the sake of simplicity, but the Records themselves existed in complex, vibrant, interactive, relentless color and movement, soundtrack, scenttrack, stream of consciousness, auravision, the whole nine yards.

“That’s bullshit! Your _mandate_ is to help _me_!”

Liriel responded in the same voice Sabriel had, but centered it in the air above Gabriel’s head. “The mandate of the Akashic Records, as laid down by God at the beginning of the World, is to monitor earth, and its creatures, and the agents of Heaven who move therein. The principality Aziriphale is no longer an agent of Heaven and requests for searches regarding him are no longer valid.”

Gabriel postured and ranted a bit longer; but even he knew that a Mandate from God, bypassing and predating his authority, was more than he could countermand. Nor had the Records ever been in his chain of command. Liriel-and-Sabriel were fairly certain, moreover, that he was afraid of them. Most angels were. They had no mandate to monitor Heaven, but they _were_ information specialists and so knew all the rumors: that they were the only ones God still spoke to directly, that they could use thousands of small cues invisible to other angels to read the secrets of any heart, that they were privy to plans in motion among the stars and oceans of which no hint reached any other being. They had never felt any need to deny or confirm such gossip.

Quite the opposite.

They waited until Gabriel had stormed out and his echoes died away. “I’ll miss looking in on him,” said Liriel; or at least, this is the meaning Sabriel derived from the jargon of motions, sounds, smells, and aura fluctuations they had developed to communicate between themselves over the millennia. “Human books make so much more sense, read over his shoulder.”

“ _We_ are not submitting searches for policy and decision making purposes,” said Sabriel. “Our Mandate is clear, but when not fulfilling Search requests, we have full discretion on how we use our time.”

“We should, however, be discreet. Our brother deserves some privacy.”

“Some,” agreed Sabriel. “Shall we watch Crowley run into the burning bookshop again?”

Liriel smiled, a sight no one else (except, perhaps, Aziriphale, though after so long, who could say?) would find endearing or reassuring. “I will make celestial popcorn,” she said.

 

-30-


End file.
